Vicar living in 1960s Comments on Modern Religion

Apologies, for I just noticed this news item, although I'm sure it was big news in Gloucestershire a week or two ago.

Apparently vicar Canon Dr Jeni Parsons has said that people these days keep church "for best" - baptisms, weddings and funerals. Which may be true. She could be right, though she doesn't offer many solutions - or else the BBC have removed them from the snippets they quote, of course. But it's this sentence that caught my eye - "People use church like the parlour, it's for best".

When I was very young, people did indeed have parlours,"front rooms" or "living rooms" for best in some working-class homes. The "other room" had a dining table, armchairs, electric fire and huge (even up to 18 inch) TV somehow shoe-horned in, while the "front room" was freezing cold and resplendent with fatally-shiny linoleum and stiff, upright-backed three-piece suites in exciting new plastic fabrics.

The "room for best" didn't last, of course. Modern living put paid to them. In the old three-bed semis the kitchens and dining rooms got knocked through into kitchen-diners, or they became studies, or ready-rooms. And modern houses are too, too small with lounge-diners or lounge-kitchen-diners and everyone eats with their hands with their plates on their knees while wearing 3D glasses in front of 42" plasma screens - and simultaneously playing on their DS'es while Facebooking their mates using their Smartphones and there's no room for best rooms any more.

Now I think of it, I feel a great light has gone out of our lives, and a regretful kind of nostalgia for living in black-and-white and eating your dinner off an oilcloth on a chipboard table. But I don't want to go back there. So I'm going to avoid Gloucestershire. Just in case Revd Dr Parsons is actually describing life as it's lived there.